A Chinese chip maker's shares surged 466% in their first day of trading as AI boom worm turns
Fortune The Associated Press ● Covered by 2 sources
China's biggest memory chipmaker just went public, and its stock jumped 466% on day one. That's the AI chip crunch talking, not just IPO hype.
CXMT, the memory chip outfit out of Hefei, just pulled off the second-largest IPO in mainland Chinese history, and the market response was somewhere between euphoric and unhinged. Shares priced at 8.66 yuan opened on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's STAR board Monday and finished the day up 466%, handing the company a valuation north of 3.3 trillion yuan, or roughly $487 billion. That makes it the single most valuable listed company on any mainland Chinese exchange. It's still smaller than Samsung, SK Hynix or Micron, but eight years ago CXMT barely existed.
The timing is not an accident. Global demand for DRAM chips has gone vertical because AI servers eat memory the way data centers eat electricity, and that shortage has been nudging up prices on everything from laptops to smartphones. CXMT's own numbers tell the story bluntly: revenue hit 50.8 billion yuan, about $7.5 billion, in the first quarter of 2026 alone, up more than 700% from a year earlier. Counterpoint Research pegs the company at roughly 9% of global DRAM shipments this year, trailing Samsung's 36%, SK Hynix's 29% and Micron's 24%, but climbing.
What makes CXMT strategically interesting isn't just the growth curve, it's what Beijing needs from it. American export controls have locked China out of the most advanced chipmaking equipment and, more pointedly, out of high-bandwidth memory chips, the specialized DRAM variant that powers cutting-edge AI accelerators. Kyle Chan at Brookings frames CXMT as China's best domestic shot at cracking HBM production, which would matter enormously for training Chinese AI models without relying on foreign suppliers. That's a tall order when your access to the best manufacturing tools is restricted and you're stuck building around whatever Chinese equipment makers can currently produce.
Counterpoint's own analysts think CXMT will need at least 15% global market share to be a durable long-term player, and they're projecting it reaches only about 11% by 2028. So the IPO frenzy is running well ahead of the company's actual production capacity. Meanwhile in Washington, some lawmakers are already pushing to bar American firms from buying CXMT chips, citing the Pentagon's assessment that the company has ties to China's military, a designation Beijing disputes. The IPO landed less than a month after SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion on the Nasdaq, which says something about how much money is chasing memory chips right now, wherever they're made.
My take
A 466% pop on day one tells you this was priced to generate headlines, not to reflect sober valuation math, and investors piling in are betting on a geopolitical bottleneck getting solved faster than the equipment restrictions actually allow. CXMT matters because it's a real test of whether export controls can permanently cap a determined state-backed competitor, and right now the honest answer is: they're slowing it down, not stopping it. Anyone cheering this as proof that sanctions don't work should sit with Counterpoint's own math — 11% share by 2028 isn't catching Samsung, it's surviving next to it.
Read more about this at: Fortune
